Wellington has always been the city that punches above its weight. We’re compact, wired-in, and brimming with ideas.
Yes, the mood music has been dour with insurance nerves, soft demand, loud external commentary. But here’s the hard truth: cities with Wellington’s fundamentals don’t fade; they reset and surge. Our job – Property Council members, investors, planners, and the public – is to lean in, not lean out.
Look at the base we’re building from. Wellington City has a strong and highly skilled workforce with businesses that consistently create real value. Households here enjoy solid incomes, giving the city spending power, confidence, and resilience. This is not a city starting on the canvas, it’s a city with a strong core and plenty of room to grow. And across the wider region, economic performance remains robust, showing that when we enable more activity, the benefits flow through.
My vision for Wellington
I see a capital where universities are finding their momentum again – with Victoria University reasserting its strengths across disciplines backed by early signs of renewed student growth. The introduction of the new Bachelor of Construction adds to this uplift, bringing advanced technologies and capability into the workforce to shape a more resilient, liveable and energy efficient built environment.
Our streets hum with hospitality as more people choose to live, study and stay in this city. In the hills, we ride a worldclass mountain bike facility and catch a lift back into town for dinner. We host a growing cluster of science and digital firms that partner with Crown Research Institutes and screen/digital studios to export ideas and innovation to the world. Tourism is steady and year-round, underpinned by a city that’s walkable, connectable, and easy to love. Our public transport system ties it all together—reliable, frequent, and designed around the way people move.
How we get there (and what it takes)
1. Social mobility by design
Drive genuine upward mobility by making deliberate, future focused choices. Zone for housing intensification in and around the centre— lifting Te Aro and Newtown with safer, greener, higher quality urban living. Match that with a serious renewal programme in tired suburbs—warm, resilient, medium-density homes within 15 minutes of services people rely on. The payoff is immediate and compounding: more residents supporting local businesses, more activity on the streets making neighbourhoods safer, and a stronger, more sustainable rate base to reinvest back into the city.
2. Back the backbone infrastructure.
Air, rail, roads, pipes—infrastructure is not a political football; it’s a 30 year investment discipline. Treat the next tranche of “builds of significance” as apolitical nation building: lock in timelines, depoliticalize sequencing and measure delivery in open, public dashboards. Wellington already has the foundations: a functioning airport, port, established supply chains, and an existing regional rail network. The task now is to connect them, modernise them, and sweat them with people and activity.
3. Put the university at the centre of the city’s growth machine.
Support Wellington universities as core drivers of the city’s future. Support Victoria University with a clear capital and precinct plan: next generation teaching and research facilities, city fringe student accommodation, and an innovation spine that stitches campus → Cuba → waterfront labs. And bring Massey’s strengths into the picture too, especially its leadership in design, creative industries, digital practice, and applied research. Together they anchor an ecosystem where domestic and international students choose to study and stay because the path from lecture theatre to paid internship to startup is obvious and short.
4. Catalysts, not wish lists.
Choose a small number of transformative moves and execute them well:
- A Movie/Screen Museum partnership—an anchor attraction that sustains shoulder season visitation and amplifies Wellington’s global screen brand.
- The worldclass MTB destination in our backyard—connect trailheads to the CBD experience and airport access, so that riding becomes part of the city’s visitor journey.
- A science–tech–digital cluster that co-locates CRIs, studios, and scaleups with wet-lab and postproduction capacity to create a collision zone for innovation.
- A major events calendar with real depth: go beyond WOW and the occasional stadium blockbuster. Curate a multi-year pipeline so hotels, venues, airlines and hospitality can plan capacity with confidence.
5. A circuit breaker on insurance.
Work with central government, reinsurers, and industry on a risk pooling mechanism or targeted premium relief for resilience upgrades—particularly for seismic strengthening and climate adaptation works.
6. Investability, by policy.
Make Wellington unmistakably investable by getting the incentives right. Offer development contribution holidays or deferrals for office to residential conversions. Introduce targeted rates remissions for green and seismic upgrades. Provide certainty for build-to-rent. Streamline consenting with clear, codified rules so there are no surprises. And enable government co-investment where projects unlock public outcomes (student accommodation, social housing, or transport interchanges).
This is how we bring more people into the city, attract businesses with confidence, and crowd in the private capital needed to lift Wellington’s next decade.
Why Wellington, and why now?
A durable economic anchor.
Central government isn’t going anywhere. Its concentration of public administration, professional services, and high skill jobs creates a stable, year-round demand engine— one that underpins tenants, suppliers, hospitality, cultural institutions, and visitor flows.
A compact, connected city that already has what others are chasing.
Proximity is Wellington’s superpower. In this city investors can create mixed use value on a single block; students can live, learn, work, and play without a car; visitors can walk from hotel to galleries to gigs in minutes. Cities all over the world are trying to retrofit what Wellington already has. use value on a single block; students can live, learn, work, and play without a car; visitors can walk from
The economics stack up.
With high GDP per job and above average household incomes, Wellington converts people and infrastructure into value. The constraint isn’t demand—it’s that we haven’t delivered enough of the right product in the right places at the right price. Fix that, and the flywheel spins.
We’ve seen this movie before.
Christchurch rebuilt through a long cycle and emerged stronger. Covid taught us that shocks eventually turn and sentiment swings back. The cities that win are those that kept delivering through the dip—so when confidence returns, they’re ready with keys, beds, lab-space and venues. Wellington should choose that same playbook.
The call
Wellington doesn’t need to reinvent itself – it needs to finish what it started. This is the moment to make tough, grown-up decisions, and choose momentum. The base infrastructure is here, the talent is here, the government engine is here—and the numbers say the value is here up decisions.
The only way to lose with Wellington is to stop investing in it.
And we’re not about to do that.
John Pengelly
Director, TSA Riley
John is a construction professional with over 35 years’ industry experience. He has hands-on experience in the delivery of large-scale design and build projects as a Main Contractor Design and Build Project Manager, and over the last 10 years as a Consultant Project Manager.
John became a Director for TSA Riley in 2017, having previously held senior roles as an Associate at Xigo (now TSA Riley), and at Mainzeal as General Manager Project Definition, and Programme Manager Major Projects. John has been leading teams in project formation and delivery providing advice to clients at all stages of the project life cycle.